Challenges in managing offshore Agile teams

This post shares some of the challenges commonly encountered while managing offshore Agile teams. In general terms we do talk about self sustaining, self managing and independent Agile teams but freedom with responsibility always has some price to pay. Managing local teams is hard enough and the challenges becomes equally harder if we talk about distributed or offshore teams.

Outsourced/offshore co-ordination problems:

no idea how team on other side is working

how time is spent by the team

why it takes 2-3 hrs in doing 15-20 min job

why the productivity is different

is the concentration same that side

is the feeling of belonging to team and motivation same

how to track work status

how to work on communication plan

why expectation of once said and will get done is different

why the challenges are more in handling offshore

why it is hard to transfer functional and contextual knowledge

These are very common questions which sooner or later do come into discussion in retrospective or during round table between management discussions.

some of the points mentioned are still valid in any of distributed/offshore teams,

Trust

Internal resistance with the notion of losing jobs

ROI (Return on Investment) not as expected

Culture and language barrier

Communication

Multiple Time zone

Multiple locations

Lack of visibility

Now a days we do have support of different development methodologies, practices and principles to minimize the overhead and lots of tools to support to cross the bridge. But at times we do come across these questions again and again, there is no silver bullet with single answer for the same. The best suited suggestion and even solution would be do go case by case and see what suits best to you and your team.